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The Upside of Messy Surroundings: Cueing Divergent Thinking

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The Upside of Messy Surroundings: Cueing Divergent Thinking ASSOCIATION FOR CONSUMER RESEARCH Labovitz School of Business & Economics, University of Minnesota Duluth, 11 E. Superior Street, Suite 210, Duluth, MN 55802 The Upside of Messy Surroundings: Cueing Divergent Thinking, Problem Solving, and Increasing Creativity Kathleen Vohs, University of Minnesota, USA Aparna Labroo, Northwestern University, USA Ravi Dhar, Yale University, USA Three studies show that messy surroundings enhance creativity on tasks associated with all three aspects of creativity: divergent thinking, convergent thinking, and problem solving. Moving beyond other work, we systematically control for potential competing explanations and test the effects across a wide range of tasks and participants. [to cite]: Kathleen Vohs, Aparna Labroo, and Ravi Dhar (2016) ,"The Upside of Messy Surroundings: Cueing Divergent Thinking, Problem Solving, and Increasing Creativity ", in NA - Advances in Consumer Research Volume 44, eds. Page Moreau and Stefano Puntoni, Duluth, MN : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 264-268. [url]: http://www.acrwebsite.org/volumes/1021558/volumes/v44/NA-44 [copyright notice]: This work is copyrighted by The Association for Consumer Research. For permission to copy or use this work in whole or in part, please contact the Copyright Clearance Center at http://www.copyright.com/. Researching Outside the Box: The Cognitive and Motivational Processes of Creativity Chair: Melanie S. Brucks, Stanford University, USA Paper #1: The Upside of Messy Surroundings: Cueing Divergent Hofstetter et al. examine how seeing the ideas of others in innova- Thinking, Problem Solving, and Increasing Creativity tion contests influences creative performance. Across four studies, Kathleen D. Vohs, University of Minnesota, USA including a field study using an actual open innovation platform, they Aparna A. Labroo, Northwestern University, USA demonstrate that seeing prior ideas from other users can facilitate Ravi Dhar, Yale University, USA creative performance or hamper creative performance, identifying competition salience as a key moderator. Paper #2: The Creative Power of Color Harmony Nara Youn, Hongik University, Korea Together, the four papers in the session enhance our understand- Changyeop Shin, Hongik University, Korea ing of when and why consumers are creative by capturing creativity Angela Y. Lee, Northwestern University, USA in a variety of ways in the lab and in the field: from classic creativ- ity paradigms (e.g., the remote association task, drawings, and in- Paper #3: The Pursuit of Creativity in Idea Generation Contests sight problems) and perceptions of innovativeness to performance Melanie S. Brucks, Stanford University, USA in open innovation contests. Collectively, these papers draw from a Szu-chi Huang, Stanford University, USA wide spectrum of literature including construal level theory, mimic- Paper #4: Creativity in Open Innovation Contests: How Seeing ry, goal-setting, self-efficacy, and competition to provide insight into Others’ Ideas Can Harm or Help Your Creative Performance the motivational and cognitive processes of creative thinking. By ap- Reto Hofstetter, University of Lugano, Switzerland proaching creativity from different angles, methods, and literatures, Darren W. Dahl, University of British Columbia, Canada we believe that this session will attract a broad audience, facilitate Suleiman Aryobsei, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland interesting discussions, and cultivate collaborations on topics related Andreas Herrmann, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland to consumer creativity. SESSION OVERVIEW The Upside of Messy Surroundings: Cueing Divergent Consumers regularly engage in creative thinking. For instance, Thinking, Problem Solving, and Increasing Creativity consumers come up with unconventional ways to use existing pos- sessions (Burroughs and Mick 2004), seek out purchases that enable EXTENDED ABSTRACT creativity (Dahl and Moreau 2007), and play an active role in cus- Society frowns upon mess. Mess is presumed to reflect low tomizing new products (Moreau and Herd 2010). In addition, com- productivity, income, education, and intellect (Abrahamson & Fried- panies have recently been turning to consumers for creative insight, man, 2007). Messy people are stereotyped as uncivil, children are harnessing their creative ideas through online crowdsourcing plat- admonished for messiness, workplaces often mandate orderliness, forms (Terwiesch and Xu 2008). Yet, in contrast to the importance and religions assert that cleanliness and orderliness are next to godli- and ubiquity of creative thinking in consumption, little research has ness (Abrahamson & Friedman, 2007). In this research, however, we investigated the mechanism of creative thinking. Specifically, what argue for the upside of mess and propose that messy surroundings are the key motivational and cognitive processes underlying creativ- cue creative thinking. ity? There are reasons to believe that messiness and creativity are The aim of this session is to contribute to this dialogue of what associated. Everyday language reflects a deep-rooted connection be- makes consumers creative and bring attention to this relatively un- tween mess and creativity. Creativity is associated with “outside the derexplored topic that both consumers and companies value. We box” thinking (Leung et al., 2012), and considered literally, putting will begin with contextual elements of creativity—surroundings and away things in a box organizes surroundings. Creativity is linked to color—and examine how these factors influence creative cognition. wild imagination, and wild is is ambiguous, unpredictable, and flex- Then, we will shift our focus onto the motivational processes of ible. So is mess. creativity in the context of idea generation contests, examining the A recent paper by Vohs, Redden, & Rahinel (2013) showed effect of goal-setting and social comparison (i.e., observing others’ — in one study with a fairly small sample for today’s requirements ideas) on creative performance. — that disorderly surroundings can make people break away from First, Vohs, Labroo, and Dhar examine how environmental cues convention and increase novelty-related thoughts. Building on these can influence creativity though environmental mimicry. In three ex- findings, we posit messy environments cue all sorts of creative think- periments, they demonstrate that a messy room enhances three as- ing. We tested our premise in three experiments. pects of creative cognition: problem solving, divergent thinking, and Experiment 1 employed a 2 (room: messy vs. orderly) between- convergent thinking. In the second paper, Youn, Shin, and Lee find subjects design. Fifty-one students participated. Depending on con- that another environmental factor, color harmony, can impact not dition, participants were placed in an area with neatly-ordered pa- only creative production, but also the perception of creativity. Across pers or disordered paper. Participants were provided with a puzzle six studies, they demonstrate that disharmonious color combina- allegedly being tested by marketers. This puzzle is comprised of two tions induce processing disfluency, which activates abstract thinking, loops that are linked and needed to be unlinked. The best solution is leading to improved performance on creativity tasks and intensified to twist the links in disparate ways. Participants were timed complet- perceptions of innovativeness in product and logo evaluations. In ing the puzzle. A one-way ANOVA revealed the expected effect of the third paper, Brucks and Huang demonstrate that the pursuit of condition, F(1, 37) = 4.44, p < .05. As predicted, participants were creativity in idea generation competitions could be counterproduc- quicker to solve the puzzle when seated in messy (M = .93 minutes) tive. Through three studies, they show that pursuing the goal to be rather than orderly surroundings (M = 2.22 minutes). creative reduces the number of creative ideas generated because the Experiment 2: A limitation of experiment 1 is that the task is not goal-directed monitoring process inhibits divergent thinking. Lastly, one conventionally used in creativity research. Moreover, this exper- Advances in Consumer Research 264 Volume 44, ©2016 Advances in Consumer Research (Volume 44) / 265 iment did not include a cleared (empty) room condition. It is possible The Creative Power of Color Harmony that a cleared room encourages creativity just as much as a messy room. Accordingly, experiment 2 made two changes: we employed a EXTENDED ABSTRACT standard test of creativity, and we included a cleared room condition While prior research focuses on the influence of color on which we expected would be similar to the orderly room condition. creativity via the symbolic meaning that each color conveys (i.e., Experiment 2 employed a 3 (room: cleared vs. messy vs. or- growth for green, and openness for blue; Lichtenfeld et al., 2012; derly) between-subjects design in which performance on the RAT Mehta & Zhu, 2009), the current research explores how color may served as the key dependent variable of interest. The cleared and influence creativity via an abstract thinking style that certain color orderly room conditions were expected to serve as conceptual repli- combinations may evoke. We posit that exposure to moderately dis- cates. Seventy-three students, native English speakers, participated. harmonious (vs. harmonious or disharmonious) color combinations As in experiment 1, participants in the messy or orderly room condi-
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